Designed for teaching: The Taylor Cloud Chamber

Abstract

It is important, today, that children should leave school with some knowledge of the atom and radioactivity. A few years ago these topics were not on A‐Ievel syllabuses, but now such work is appearing both there and at O‐Ievel. So that the work could be taught by means of experiments and not by words alone, a new generation of school science equipment has appeared. Amongst this is a simple but effective version of a piece of apparatus that has been vital to the progress of discoveries in radioactivity since it was invented by C. T. R. Wilson in 1911. This is the cloud chamber, which renders visible the paths of the α and β particles, and the γ radiation, emitted by radioactive substances. Comparatively few physicists have enjoyed the sight of a cloud chamber in action; we have usually had to be content with track photographs in textbooks and have tended to think that a cloud chamber is costly, complicated, difficult to use and only to be found in research laboratories. This attitude could not be more wrong and the Nuffield physics project introduces the simple diffusion cloud chamber to school children at the age of 11, and moreover, not as a mere demonstration, but as a class experiment carried out by the children themselves.

Citation

Taylor, B. (1966), "Designed for teaching: The Taylor Cloud Chamber", Education + Training, Vol. 8 No. 7, pp. 316-317. https://doi.org/10.1108/eb015741